The King is Mine: A Series of Little Things
by DeadBoy'sBloodyBlossom
Summary: Short pieces written about Riku and the people who love him, for better or worse. Built around disturbing imagery and pretty words. Riku/Absolutely Everyone
1. Histrionics

The King is Mine, the King is Dead: A Series of Little Things

A/N: Riku's crazy. Or maybe he isn't. He's probably just sick. Whatever. Either way, Sora's pretty sure he's both crazy and sick. Here are a series of little things, that have the same characters and such, but otherwise barely relate to each other. Oneshots! Oneshots based on images that I find disturbing. If you have an image I might exploit, please share. These will probably end one of two ways, lovey or sexy... Lucky us!

Song and dance of disclaimer! And that's the only one you get! My legal obligation has been filled, I will not be sued, nor shall I sue.

Chapter one: Histrionics

Image: Kids kill other kids. One of them freezes. And also, my theme is apparently euphemisms.

* * *

"So... this one kid killed another kid," Riku said. Sora could barely hear him, as he spoke through his scarf, wrapped up to his nose.

"What do you mean?" Sora asked, rubbing his hands together. It was cold out, one of those gray October days when the wind was so very quiet, but so very cold. The horizon looked bleached, sad, and the only clouds in the sky offered no majestic, sweeping, daydream images, but rather, sad wispy protection from a white sun that had singed the mare's tails to frazzled tips.

"That's it," Riku said, shrugging. "Just one kid killed another. I don't know if it was an accident or not." Riku closed his eyes. Sora watched his purplish eyelids throb like butterflies. "But there he was, all spread out on the ground. He looked cold, and he wasn't bleeding or anything."

Riku opened his eyes. "He looked a bit like an angel really. He couldn't have been more than five. A perfect little Hollywood death too, nothing gross about it, just the breath taken right out of his pink little body. The other five year old came clean about killing him. He said it was an accident, and he just left him laying there in the snow."

Those eyes turned on Sora. They were strange. Many called them sky blue, or 'sea foam,' though that felt more like a white colour to Sora. The colour of Riku's eyes had nothing to do with foam or skies. They always conjured a very specific image to Sora. Blue bottles. Old blue bottles, hundreds of them lined up on a beach, reflecting onto emerald waters.

"Did you actually see the kid, Riku?"

Those eyes turned away from Sora. "No, but it was pretty vivid."

Sora's looked up when he heard the breaks of a bus settle. It was theirs. He was happy to be able to get up off of the uncomfortable plastic seat. He looked over at Riku. He had pulled his bag over his shoulder and was standing as well. His rather elegant profile almost blended into the gray sky. There were crows in the dumpster that Sora could see over Riku's shoulder. The blended in with him as well. Odd.

The two sat together. Riku let out little puffs of breath against the window, and then he drew things with a gloved finger. They may have been horrible things, but the glove obscured the elegant lines and motions that Riku made. The strokes were wide, tapering too dramatically.

"Did that really happen? The kid killing the other kid?"

Riku looked at him, and Sora could almost swear he was smiling behind his scarf. He said something that Sora couldn't hear around the engine, and the scarf, and the chatter of the other people on the bus.

They got home later than they'd hoped. Riku shed his cold weather garb, hanging his scarf carefully on the back of his wicker desk stool, but tossing the coat casually on the couch. Sora watched him, chewing on his thumbnail. Sometimes things that the other man did entranced him. He particularly liked it when he used the phone.

Because Riku loved rotary phones. They looked elegant in his hands, and that look was never really lost on Sora. The way he tossed his coat, though... So casual, so -truthful isn't the right word, but it was the only one he had- truthful.

"How are you feeling?" Sora asked, as he grabbed Riku's hip, spinning him into his arms and pressing his chin against Riku's head. Riku was taller, but Sora preferred this position. Riku's soft crown bumped and brushed his chin. "You aren't... acting right."

"Am I ever right?" Riku asked, bringing a hand up to rest against Sora's chest, running soft, teasing circles over his shirt. "But yes, I am fine. And I don't know if you heard me earlier. When you asked me about the kids, if it was all real."

"Was it real to you? Did you make it up entirely?"

Riku didn't answer, just looked at his hands.

Sora kissed his head, placed a hand over his bottle blue eyes, and hushed him. "Kids don't kill kids, Riku. When you kill someone you aren't a kid anymore." Riku let out a soft breath. It sounded like his last breath, a short wave of happy air. Sora felt it against his collar, ostensibly warm with life, though cold with his death.

"Riku..."

"Hey, it's okay. Don't look at me like that. Shostakovich had it too."

"Was he this miserable?"

Riku frowned, though Sora didn't see it, so much as feel it. The little cogs in Riku's brain were trying hard to work out an answer. "I am not miserable. But... he was. Ever listen to any of his later music? He was sick all the time, broke his legs, stopped being able to play piano. Luckily I don't have the polio. He had more of a reason to be miserable. But kids still kill kids Sora. You know they're kids when they leave a dead body in the snow, hoping that no one would notice, and maybe hoping they'd come back to life. That's a kid, Sora. That's still a kid."

Sora pushed him away, putting both hands roughly on his shoulders. "Why are you thinking about this!?" He shook the other man, frustrated, worried, pissed even. "Why are you obsessed with death!?"

"I hardly call it an obsession," Riku said. The shaking hadn't done much to faze him, though Sora could see in his eyes that he was somewhat disoriented. The bottle blue, the emerald sea green, those irises were hazy. "It's an awareness."

Sora pulled him close again. "A poetic awareness." He tried not to strangle the other man. His best friend, his lover, his dying pitiable lover. "A freakish, poetic awareness. If I can't help you... then tell me what you saw, tell me everything you saw. Will that help?"

"I'm sure it will," Riku said. Sora's scent eased him. Even when the other man was on edge, ready to rip his hair out, ready to kick Riku out of their apartment, ready to drop him for someone who wasn't about to die, for someone who he didn't think was crazy, it still eased him. Even though Sora felt like that then, even though Sora was ready to slit Riku's throat to end it, both of their pain and frustration, he still trusted that scent to ease him. Sora knew that, Sora trusted that would never change, not until the day that the crab growing in Riku's chest began to usher blood across those pearly pink lips of Riku's, not until the coughs got worse, not until a dull ache settled in his chest and never went away.

That night he mounted Riku, who's hands balled up the sheets. The coal coloured sky outside the window distracted them both. Sora ripped open a condom with his teeth. Riku asked him why he bothered, it wasn't as though they could get pregnant, and they had never been with anyone else. Sora didn't answer, he knew Riku would be upset if he told him.

He was scared of the crab growing in him, scared that he'd feel it, scared that it would touch him in such a private place. If he felt the stray strands of sex crazed cells at least there would be something between that writhing mess of death and his flesh. And he looked at Riku's chest and knew that it was in there, not _down there_. Sora pressed his ear against Riku's chest when he entered him, listening for it. Riku assumed it was an act of affection and put his long, delicate, snowy hands around Sora's head. He urged him to move, softly asked him to go _harder, deeper, closer _to the _thing _growing in him.

Sora heard his voice echoing in the hollow of his chest, but not the crab. They both looked out the window. That lasted a while, and then Sora captured Riku's lips, and they stopped looking. They pretended for a bit that there was no oppressive darkness just outside of their curtains. There was nothing in his mouth. It was only in his chest, around his lungs, near his heart. The crab ate the light out of his heart.

Sora finally understood him, understood that Riku wasn't crazy. He enjoyed, for the last few moments, the slippery sounds of lube, flesh in flesh, human body on human body. He pulled Riku close and the last thing he thought of was Riku in the snow, his heart swollen from its touch of brutal pain. A real Hollywood death, clean, bloodless, just a white little boy on white snow, no crab, no sickness, and no murder.

"No," Riku whispered. "There were no children."

* * *

A/N: Eugh... They are feeling things here that I'm not really sure they should have been feeling. And also, if the cancer thing seemed out of left field, it was. It wanted to get written, so I wrote the first reference (the Shostakovich line, by the way), with every intention of erasing it. But it wanted to stay, so there it is. I also really hate the word cancer. It seems more like a thing to me than a disease, and 'cancer' just sounds like a disease name. I also apologize for the sheer amount of obscure and not so obscure lyric references in this piece. Sorry for any bad grammar and such, I believe some would called this 'hot off the press.'


	2. Cockles

The King is Mine, the King is Dead: A Series of Little Things

A/N: Riku is still crazy, but he's part of something, or maybe something is a part of him. Or maybe everyone is fucking crazy and all Sora wants to do is screw Riku silly. Riku's feet are stuck on the ground, but he's constantly called to the sea. This may need to be a two part story, since I'd like to give Roxas a story here, and also eventually outright say what Riku is exactly, since I was very, very vague about that. This story is more an exercise in symbolism than anything, so forgive me if it makes NO sense. Happy interpreting!

Chapter two: Cockles

Image: St. James, and also apparently a lot of novels.

"There's someone dead down there," Riku said, settling himself on the side of the rocky cliff. He took a deep breath of ocean air and then turned to look at Sora, his gorgeous face twisted with a perverted grin. "Dead slaves, and slavers, and stuff."

"Why would those things be here?" Sora asked. He wanted to sit by Riku's side, but he had never learned how to navigate the rocky terrain. He wasn't like Riku. Riku knew the place like the back of his hand. The geography, the people, the history. Most disturbingly the history.

"There was a wreck here." With that, Riku seemed unhappy sitting down. He stood and turned his face into the wind, the gray air, the poison of Destiny Islands. "It was a slave ship, on its way to… somewhere. I think they rested here. They may have wrecked, they may have been killed by someone. That part I'm not too sure about."

"Are they still down there?"

"Who knows," he said, his smile stretched across his face demonically. "Probably. I doubt anyone actually wanted to be the person to go down there and get the bodies. Just left them to rot in the water, slaves all still chained up. They had no hope…"

"Can we talk about something else?" Sora asked.

Riku had a way of destroying his nerves, making Sora feel feeble. Riku was lovely, dark, and intelligent, and knew too much sometimes. Destiny Islands made people crazy, at least, that's what Sora's father always said. Riku may have been crazy, and Destiny Islands may have been the problem.

Sora had family on the Islands. Every now and again his mother would suddenly wonder what her sister was up to, or why her cousin hadn't called in so long. Every summer she treated family visits like vacations, which suited Sora fine. He had friends after spending so many years visiting, and he rather liked the gray, somewhat oppressive weather.

There were 'beaches' everywhere, but those were mostly just rocky mountains that jutted out into the sea. Harsh waves beat an almost harmonious rhythm during the day. At night it almost sounded like talking, screaming sometimes. Riku probably had a story about that.

"What do you suppose we talk about?" Riku asked. "Maybe… how was school?"

Sora had good reason to be somewhat suspicious of this line of questioning. Riku was a hateful young man, biting, cruel, sometimes he almost seemed bitter. A person so young hardly had reason to be bitter, at least, Sora thought not.

"School was fine, slow as usual."

"So what's it like?"

Destiny Islands had one high school, and that high school saw the matriculation of about one hundred fifty students total. And there was something wrong with all of them.

"You know, normal, I guess. So many people that no one can remember your face unless you're a quarterback, so few teachers that really care, not enough work to actually keep you occupied." Sora shrugged. "You know… the usual stuff. You get a few friends, you do your own thing. Nobody likes anyone else."

"That last bit sounds familiar," Riku said, expertly hopping over towards him, not once faltering on the slippery rocks, not once sliding on long slick grass. The gray air, the ghosts in the sea, the craziness, all of was Riku, all of it. "But none of that sounds 'normal' to me. We have about thirteen teachers who all kinda care, everyone knows everyone. Your version sounds horrifying."

The wind picked up, whipping their hair around them. The ocean screamed at them. The souls in the ocean screamed at them. Riku held out a hand. Sora couldn't make it down himself. He took the hand. It was rough and dirty, large around Sora's, but the fingers were so elegant.

Carefully Riku lead them down the steep path from the 'beach' and its gray air, down into the city with its people in their old houses. Long grasses stretched out all over the place, and over the low hill just to the south of the little town one could make out the dark, rounded shapes of the graveyard. Everyone on the island was buried there, someday Riku would be buried there. His long pretty hands clasped over his chest, angular face turned to the sky, sooty eyelashes forever glued to his cheeks.

Sora's stomach turned when he realized that he was imagining Riku dead, quite vividly, and not terribly far in the future. It was this place, it was the Islands. Something in the air, something in the earth. It made Sora crazy, it made him morbid. It made him morbid like it made Riku morbid. It turned Riku morbid in the same way that it made Kairi deny.

Riku let go of Sora's hand. They had been on flat earth for almost a minute before Riku realized. That action was human. It made Sora feel better, and it helped him to forget how pretty Riku would look in his coffin.

"I'm not taking you all the way up to your place," Riku said, indicating what some would call a road. It was long since overgrown with the same long weeds. Along the sides of the road the remnants of what may once have been a stone wall stood like sentinels.

"Why?"

Riku smiled and then laughed. "Got a lot of work to do today, no time."

Riku never walked him to the old three story house. There were some stories he didn't tell. That may have been for the better. Some stories were not meant to be heard by some ears, least the effects be undesirable.

Sora got back to the house, opened the creaky door, stepped on the creaky floor, and stared straight ahead at the lace curtains in the back room as he shut the door behind him. Somewhere in the house his older brother was lurking. He came outside sometimes, when the flattest beach was clear of jellyfish, and the air wasn't too gray.

"Madness runs in our bones, kiddo," Leon had said to him only a few days ago while they were still packing. And Leon was right about it. The graveyard held who knows how many of their ancestors.

"Hello?" he called.

His cousin, a surprisingly similar looking boy the exact same age named Roxas, answered him by poking his head out of the office. "The moms went to Radiant Garden to shop," he informed him, taking a big bite from a Payday.

"Where'd you get that?" Sora asked. "I thought your mom didn't believe in sugar, and blah, blah."

"Yeah, got it out of the drawer in her desk." He smiled mischievously. "Out with Riku, huh?" he asked, closing the door behind him and locking it with a fluid movement. He slipped the house's skeleton key into his pocket. His mother usually kept a close eye on it.

"Yes," Sora said shortly and sharply. Roxas didn't much care for Riku and vice-versa. "There a problem with that?"

"He's a faggot, you know. He's probably trying to sink his evil gay claws into you," he said. The smile was gone, but he was still in a borderline manically pleased mood, it was all in his eyes.

"I don't care. I like his stories, and I like him."

Roxas scoffed and wrapped an arm around Sora's shoulders. "His stories? He's a liar, Sora. Those things that he talks about aren't real, he just makes up stories about everything because he can't possibly accept that a rock is a rock, that the ocean sounds the way it does because it just does. Don't tell me that you believe him?"

Sora thought for a moment. Yeah, he did. Riku was a good storyteller if nothing else, maybe he wanted to believe in some darkness in the world. "Yeah, I do."

"Then you're as crazy as he is." Roxas moved his arm from around Sora's shoulders and tossed the candy bar wrapper at him, hitting him in the face. "There's nothing dead here, the sounds aren't voices."

"You sound like Kairi."

"Kairi isn't stupid."

Roxas didn't live on the Islands either. He lived somewhere where Sora had never been, Twilight Town, a city so big and so dirty that it was hard to see the sun come up over the buildings and the pollutants. Destiny Islands wasn't exactly what Roxas was used to. He had to be abrasive, a bully to get anywhere where he came from. A few days on the Islands usually fixed his attitude, but until then… frankly he was an ass. And then, at the end of the summer he'd return to his father's home in Twilight Town and the process would start all over.

Sora didn't much feel like arguing with Roxas about Kairi and Riku. It was simply safe to say that Roxas had his own friends on the Islands and they had their own slew of issues that Sora could fire at him in retaliation, but he had better manners than that.

Sora waved Roxas off with a wry smile. "Yeah, yeah, I'll keep the histrionic homosexual in check, alright?" he said, offering his cousin his most disarming puppy dog look.

"In check… sure."

"He's hot, right?"

Sora was caught off guard, so much so that his stick of sea salt ice cream tumbled onto the rocks and slid down and down until it disappeared off the edge of a low cliff into the dark water. He looked over at Kairi, who was smiling at him brightly, trying to tuck her hair out of her eyes. She moved her head in Riku's direction.

He had gotten farther away than they could. Neither Kairi nor Sora wanted to attempt getting so close to the cliff edge. Kairi always told Sora that it felt like where the world ended, and she had no business looking at it. Somehow, Sora instinctively knew that she meant the end of Riku's world. He was so much the island, and it was so much him.

"Riku?" she went on, shaking Sora's shoulder. He looked at her, half way between being disgusted and intrigued. No, he didn't really think that Riku was hot, Sora had been adamantly denying any possible physical attraction that he could have towards Riku, even though he himself knew better. But he was secure in the fact that Riku was pretty.

He was damn pretty, with his long hair, his long hands, his gorgeous pale skin, and his shining sea glass coloured eyes. His hair was up; Sora could see the long marble like neck that vanished into a stunning tangle of silver strands. He was beautiful, utterly beautiful, like an angel. He was like a frantically flickering flame stuck in a lantern called Destiny Islands, waiting for his Maldoror.

"Sora!" Kairi screamed, grabbing his sleeve, trying to pull him up while trying to use him to push herself up. Neither of them got there in time, but they both watched Riku slump over, shoulders go lax, and fall. The side of his head hit the rocks. The last thing Sora saw was the hand, thrown up by his trajectory, gliding into the air like a swallow, fingers pointing heavenward, spreading, clenching. It was almost like he was trying to grasp some rope coming out of the sky.

It felt like slow motion to Sora. He got up, pushing Kairi back, hopping over the slippery stones and throwing his torso over the edge of the cliff. He watched the pale body vanish into the ocean, saw the foam swallow the hand, the hair.

Sora imagined Riku again, dead, his eyes open, milky white, hair floating around him like a wild halo, arms clasped in manacles, chest bare except for several long sets of whip marks.

Laying there, face down on the cliff, staring at the place where Riku had vanished, Sora imagined him a dead slave and found himself sinfully turned on. Sunlight beat off of the ocean in the distance, the sun was setting. A rainbow of colours shimmered down on the sparkling water, and there was no sign of Riku, no sign of pale hands, of pale hair, or pale eyes.

He walked Kairi home after they spent several hours trying to explain to the authorities what had happened. Everyone knew Riku, no one thought he'd be foolish enough to go up on the cliffs when he wasn't feeling well, or when he was tired. Eventually they agreed to help, and Sora wanted to do nothing more but get home and take care of a more personal problem.

He had touched himself to Riku more than once. He kept trying to tell himself that he wasn't into necrophilia or anything, but the idea of Riku's body, unmoving, frozen in its beautiful form… It did things to him. He bowed his head against his bed and ran one finger up the length of his shaft, making his shoulders quiver.

A cold, hand too small to be any use, wrapped around his erection and began to pump. He wished that it was Riku's hand, or that he was sinking into Riku's body, nose pressed into fragrant silver locks. Riku would turn his head, flushed and alive. Sora came, spilling white all over his white sheets. He had surprised himself with that one. He wanted Riku's body, alive. He wanted his craziness, he wanted to be buried with him in that dismal graveyard.

Roxas slipped into the room, looked at the sheets, and then the hand loosely clamped around a softening erection. Sora's face was contorted with something curious, and he looked up at Roxas and carefully pulled himself back into his pants.

"What?"

"I found him, you want him?" Roxas asked, gnawing on a hunk of chocolate. He pointed with his thumb behind him. "I mean, you don't really seem too bummed out about it. He wondered up here covered in cockle shells."

"… He's okay?"

"Hm, yeah, seems fine."

"And he came here."

"Weird, huh?"

"Roxas…"

"I kissed him senseless," Roxas said, smiling wide. "He looked like he wanted some breath in him, so I put it there." He tossed his eyes over his shoulder, glancing down the dark hallway. "He's pretty, like a woman. That's why you want him right? The reason you agree to come here every summer?"

Sora was somewhat lost for words. Roxas leaned forward, pressing his lips to Sora's ear. "Me too. And I know what you think about, him dead, right?" he asked, slipping an arm around Sora's waist and pulling him flush against his chest. "We could both do him."

Sora pushed away and then pushed past him, shouldering him hard as he went. As promised, Riku was there, still damp, wearing a towel around his shoulders, holding a cockle shell in his hand. His body was slumped against the leather couch weakly, though not in the way that suggests he'd been hurt, but that he'd been broken. "This is the only place I could think to come," he said softly.

"I thought you hated it here," Sora said, sitting down, taking the cockle out of his hand. He smiled at the irony as he tossed it in the air. "Funny you'd come here."

"Expect to find me in a field somewhere?" Riku asked, smiling wryly.

"I'd carry you away and build a temple to you."

"Santiago De Compostella," Riku whispered, staring into one of the dark rooms across the way. The gray air swirled with the dust and the age all around the house. The darkness, the dust, the age, all of it stuck to Riku, and he glowed brighter than the angel in the lamp because there was no Maldoror to take him away.

"I didn't take you for the Christian type."

"I'm not. We've got the chronology a bit off though."

"Riku, can I…"

He was cut off when the crazy boy pressed his lips to his and pulled back, staring at the ceiling, hand darting out to take back the cockle. "You have to make the trip yourself to get one. I earned my pardon. Do you want me to tell you about this house?"

The bitter, hateful young man was back, but the cockle in his hand glowed. It sucked the malice out of him, made him bright and pure. "There were dreams that I used to have that this house was filled with music boxes that sang like sirens. Mirrors, gold, real rococo really, all the fuzzy paintings too. But it was the music boxes that got me, they got me… they got me hard. They were the first thing I ever responded to sexually. I started to dance like the figures in the boxes, and then suddenly the world fell down around me, and all that was left were blue eyes and me."

Sora kissed him, holding his shoulders, straddling his lap, rubbing their shared shame together for friction, for warmth. Riku's moist skin made Sora weak. Something inside him was shivering and giving in. "You survived falling off that cliff. You're fine."

Riku moaned, bucking up against him. "Yeah, that's what happens when you're tied to something. You're naturally drawn to the places that give your life colour." He slipped Sora's shirt off and made a trail of kisses down his ribs.

"You know I'm gay right?" Riku asked, almost teasing, almost bitter.

"Part siren, part saint, and all homosexual? I'd not have it any other way."

So Sora did get to sink into that body while Roxas listened, watched, the shadow over his face dangerous, the joint of his index finger in his mouth. Sora didn't care that Roxas was watching; he was almost stimulated when he noticed that the shadow was hiding movement near Roxas' lower half.

Sora planted his hands on Riku's hips and plowed into him, kissing his shoulder. The smell of their combined sweat made him almost furious with desire. It was the two of them, perfectly alive and perfectly together.

Sora and Riku both left. Riku waved at both of them from the cliff. This time he didn't fall, but he held the cockle in his hand and looked almost like he planned to fall again.


End file.
